Background and history

Before the origins

Playing with or for water sharing and management has probably been the origin of one of the most common existing distribution game (outside the Go), the Awele or Mancala families (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_(mancala_game) with a principle of distributing tokens and getting and emptying places. We'll see how WAG is similar to this, and very different meanwhile... We found track of popular use of these games in the regions of development of WAG, like this picture from the Sekororo municipality in South-Africa.

WAT-A-GAME
has been designed as a follow-up of series of applied projects
(Barreteau et al., 2001; Ferrand, Nancarrow, 2005; Cavailles et al,
2005; Farolfi, Rowntree, 2007; Daniell, 2008) dealing with water
management and governance, using games as educational, exploratory
and transformative processes.

From a modelling process for schools...

Between
2003 and 2007 we have had played more than
30 times a first educational river basin game. Designed to be used
during half-day sessions with non trained teachers in classes of
pupils age 8 to 15, it was to be simple and with no preparation. It
had also to contribute to the learning of integrated water management
and its main concept. Therefore in a first stage, the young
participants, gathered in groups of 3 to 5, had to draw a scheme of
their overall water system, on a large white page showing only the
sky on top and the sea at the bottom, and based on series of stickers
showing the names of key concepts or entities (“river”, “pump”,
“spring”, “farmer”, “pollution”, “forests”…).

They
could also add new ones on post-it. The form of the drawing was an
hybrid spatial and functional map, and it could be done either on
paper boards, or on computer, using tools like Cmap (IHMC, 2007).
This scheme was showing the transfer of water from the sky to the
sea, passing through all uses and processes. Some corrections and
additions could be made at the end by the teacher. Then in a second
phase, the facilitator or teacher put a large bunch of water tokens
(usually paper binders or flat marbles) in the “sky” and step by
step flew it through the system, splitting it and moving throughout
the graph. This qualitative “hand ran” simulation led to simply
demonstrate evaporation, run-off, infiltration, and sharing water
among the different uses. Eventually not enough water was still
flowing downstream the basin and left for these users. In some cases
pupils could play the role of some of the users (farmers, dam
managers, mayors, river ecologists) and had to argue about the water.

Figure
1 : A scheme produced (2004) by pupils
age 11-12. Water tokens are flown on this graph using paper staples as drops !

To a prototype of water management game

However,
teachers not experts themselves in water
management felt uneasy with running manually this simulation. To
improve this, we have started designing a new version with a student group of DIFED (Cavailles et
al, 2005), including more prepared materials, and especially transfer
or consumption functions for the different activities. But we wanted
to keep the participatory design phase, critical for learning, and
the tuning of the support scheme to the known, sensible, water system
of participants. A trade-off between preparation, calibration and
appropriation had to be found.

Meanwhile
we have pursued operational games where
many features appeared to be common and some repetitions were
experienced in the development. Still, both in terms of scientific
issues addressed and in terms of tuning to the specific cases,
differences exist, especially in the settings of the targeted river
system, and in the complexity of the management process. Again, a
trade-off between genericity and adaptation was to be sought.

And some developments on "upscaling companion modelling" in South-Africa

More
recently, looking for strategies toward “upscaling” the
“Companion Modeling Approaches” (Commod, 2003), one of the
options for bringing these processes to higher and wider decision
levels has appeared to be their generalization and the capacity given
to non expert facilitators to adapt and repeat games at lower cost.

As a potential methodological choice for M. Manuel Magombei phd research (who had supported the implementation of an intermediary test of the RiverGame of Bruce Lankford ), we have proposed (2007) to develop a inter-scale model in norther SOuth-Africa.

Following
these various rationales, we have started assessing
the needs for a generic infrastructure, called WAT-A-GAME, and which
could facilitate and speed up development of new applications. In a
second step, we have designed, built and tested two versions, through
experiments in educational context in France, and operational context
in South –Africa – where it’s been renamed as “Amanzi”,
water in
the local dialect xhozi.

Design and improvements through tests and versions

Since 2008 we have designed, pre-tested and operationnaly tested several versions of WAG, dealing with all the constraints of use, usefulness, playability, complexity, etc. Through the tests we have step by step improved the game, including new approaches of the social and economic issues, the water dynamics, and the actions by players.

Moving forward to an open kit and version for dissemination

After (2010) the election of WAG as pre-industrial project by Cemagref and CIRAD, we have started designing a specific version for building a toolkit to be disseminated. We have based much of the improvement on various sessions of course with executive students from Agence du Bassin du Niger, South-African Dept of Water Affairs Executive Course, Niger basin course, and other participants in France.

Back to the north

Since the late 2010, we have started, with LISODE, developing a mediterranean version and a north european version, which we start promoting and disseminating for european institutions and partners.